Joe Rogan and Daniel Ek commit to beefed up and more transparent content polices in response to Neil Young boycott

completemusicupdate.com:

Both Joe Rogan and Spotify boss Daniel Ek have now formally responded to the headline-grabbing criticism that has been made about COVID misinformation in the former’s podcast and on the latter’s platform.

Ek has pledged more transparency about his company’s policies for dealing with harmful content, while Rogan says he will look into ways to ensure his programme is more balanced in the future, in particular by having “more experts with differing opinions, right after the controversial ones”.The official statements from Rogan and Ek were in response to a rapidly building backlash against Spotify that was kickstarted by an open letter from Neil Young just one week ago.

He in turn was responding to a letter signed by more than 250 scientists and medics earlier this month which said that the Joe Rogan Experience podcast had “a concerning history of broadcasting misinformation, particularly regarding the COVID-19 pandemic”.Although that latter letter took particular issue with an edition of Rogan’s podcast which featured controversial COVID vaccine critic Dr Robert Malone, the scientists and doctors said that the programme had regularly given a platform to controversial opinions about the coronavirus, with both Rogan and some of his guests at times arguably implying those controversial opinions were proven fact.Spotify, of course, is the exclusive distributor of the ‘Joe Rogan Experience’, it having signed up the controversial podcaster as part of its strategy to dominate the podcasting market.

As a result, the experts said, it was responsible for ensuring that potentially damaging misinformation did not appear in the programme.